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Amazon and Google are pushing ahead with plans to develop their own air traffic control network for low-level altitudes so their drones can make deliveries.

The commercial drone industry would create the privately funded and operated air-traffic control network, entirely separate from the current federal system, the MailOnline reports.

The plans were outlined at a conference earlier in the week and have the backing of major players including Amazon, General Electric, Boeing and Google.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the system would use automated cellular and web applications to track and prevent collisions among swarms of small unmanned aircraft flying a few hundred feet above the ground.

The move would create a sort of 'drone superhighway' and would be the next step in Amazon's ambitious plans to deliver packages via drone within 30 minutes.

The vision is in line with that of Google's which would see all tracked drones communicate their positions to a centralised computer system available to all operators, similar to aviation airspace, to avoid any collisions.

In conjunction with NASA, tests are already being planned over the next three months at a handful of sites.

The intent is to develop a "totally different, new way of doing things", Parimal Kopardekar, NASA's senior air-transport technologist who first suggested the idea of an industry-devised solution, told about 1,000 attendees at the conference.

The test flights would work out how drones would function on a network and interact with one another but even a limited deployment will take at least two years and things could take even longer with various engineering and policy hurdles to be overcome.

They also need to work with the Federal Aviation Administration's existing ground-based radars and human controllers.